Jacolby Satterwhite

This week starts off slow, presumably to give those of us who were at the Miami fairs a bit of time to recover. Today we’ve listed Ballet at the Brooklyn Museum and Faith Ringgold at MoMA and that’s it. Thursday, look out. Chelsea will be a zoo. We’ve listed Michelle Grabner and Andrew Kuo as picks, but there’s plenty more to see. Friday head to Bushwick. Every gallery and their dog is hosting an opening, including Parlour and Interstate. We recommend picking up a few Christmas presents at some of these galleries. Emerging art is very affordable, and your parents will either love it or give it back to you. Either way, that’s a win-win scenario.

Last week, GRIN Gallery in Providence opened the AFC-curated exhibition Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies: The Animated GIF as Place. It’s the IRL version of our online exhibition with Providence College—Galleries and will be installed until July 2nd. GRIN sent us these install shots, and it’s pretty remarkable how different and complimentary the physical show feels to the online component.

In the gallery, we installed GIFs included in the online exhibition from Hugo Moreno, Sara Ludy, Petra Cortright, Dina Kelberman, Ying Miao, Clement Valla, and Gizelle Zatonyl as well as different works from Nicolas Sassoon and Wickerham & Lomax. We also installed two pieces from Victoria Fu: the video projection “Velvet Peel 2” and animated neon sculpture “Pinch-Zoom.” These are all about the way bodies relate to screens and illusionistic space, so Fu was a perfect fit for an IRL exhibition about digital spaces.

We also screened all of the GIFs in the exhibition as well as longer video works from the artists and longer-form GIFs from Jacolby Satterwhite. GRIN (60 Valley Street, Unit 3
Providence, RI) is hosting another outdoor screening on June 25th from 8 – 10 p.m., so if you didn’t catch the opening, be sure to check it out! We have to say, even if we hadn’t curated this show, we’d be giving it a giant neon thumbs-up.

I’ve always been fascinated with the ways in which a GIF from a larger digital video work can loop ad infinitum beats deserving to be isolated. Take for instance, the seven GIFs taken from Jacolby Satterwhite’s Reifying Desire project, which are included in our current curatorial project, Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies.

As those subscribed to our mailing list will already know, today Providence College—Galleries launched its inaugural online exhibition “Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies: The Animated GIF as Place”. Curated by the Art F City team. Michael Anthony Farley, Paddy Johnson, and Rea McNarama, the show is the result of six months worth of planning, development and careful consideration. We are extremely proud of it.

Given that the press release has already gone out, we’re using the blog as the publishing platform for our curatorial essay. We hope it will give viewers a window into the sense of wonder we often have looking at these works.

2015 was great for art. For all the bitching that went on about art fairs, the dominance of the market, and sub-par museum shows (cough, cough Björk), I saw more great shows than I have in my ten years working as a critic in New York. Rather than try to whittle our picks down to a few select shows, we wrote up every show we thought was truly exemplary.

If fair overload doesn’t kill you this week, the events will. Get ready for the Whitney Biennial, the Last Brucennial, and a throwdown show by Anthony Antonellis at Transfer this weekend. Don’t count on sleeping this week.

There’s been a variety of fun and whimsical art events lately, but every once in a while there’s a week of substantive works which we’ll be thinking back on for years to come. Performa is one of those, and the online biennial “The Wrong” might be another. And after 41 years, this Tuesday’s event at the Clocktower Gallery may be your last opportunity to visit before it’s turned into luxury condos.

In its thirty-three year run, the Bronx Museum’s AIM (Artists in the Marketplace) Program has touched a surprising extent of the New York art world. It’s rare to go on a gallery tour in this city without coming across one of its alumni, who range from establishment members like Glenn Ligon and Anton Vidokle, to rising stars like LaToya Ruby Frazier and David Gilbert. And now, AIM’s second Biennial “Bronx Calling”–a recent development for program alums–adds 73 new members to the roster. It’s a truly diverse showing of New York City-based talent getting its first leg-up into the art market. As far as the commercial art world is concerned, AIM is the Bronx Museum’s most significant contribution to New York art. So why aren’t people talking about this?